The Tor Network: Freedom and Privacy Online

Abstract

The Tor network is among the most popular tools to protect privacy and avoid censorship online. It has an estimated 2 million users, protects over 100 Gbps of Internet traffic, and provides security to over 100,000 onion services. Tor is used by journalists to protect their sources, law enforcement to perform undercover investigations, political activists to overcome censorship, and ordinary people to avoid corporate and government surveillance. This talk will describe the history of Tor, present its technical design, describe its security properties, and present a vision for the future development of the network.

Slides

Video

Ask question to lecturer

About the lecturer

Dr. Aaron Johnson is a computer scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. His research interests include private communication and privacy-preserving data analysis. He has performed foundational mathematical research in the area of anonymous communication by modeling and analyzing the security of onion routing. He has also applied mathematically-rigorous privacy-preserving methods to publishing sensitive genetic and network data. Much of his work has been focused on the Tor network, which is an onion-routing network used by over 2 million users daily to secure their communications. He designed several improvements to Tor, including denial-of-service defenses, faster onion services, privacy-preserving network monitoring, and improvements to Tor’s path selection. Many of these results have been incorporated into the Tor network and provide enhanced security, performance, and utility to its many users. Dr. Johnson received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the computer science department at Yale University and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Texas at Austin.